But I’m trying to keep my pledge to go to my happy place. So what if I’m going to be thrown in a dissenter’s prison in a few years? Might as well have a smile on my face when I’m being carted off! So here’s a bit of good news:

The stimulus package contains enough aid to New York to stave off a lot of the more draconian cuts to education and health care that our Mayor and Governor were considering. This is really good news for us Noo Yawkaz, considering that after 9/11 we were promised billions by Bush and the money either never arrived, or ended up in the pockets of, wait for it, wait for it – Big Business! Bottom line is, my state and city have been suffering for almost eight years now and we deserve some relief.

The other good news is from overseas. The Welsh National Assembly is proving that the 30% Solution works in real-time. Check out the details here.

In the meantime, take deep breaths and put your money in your mattress or roll it over to a bank like ING Direct. The stock market isn’t going to be a good place to hang out for at least two or three years, IMHO.

(Happy New Year to all you Joooz out there! May it bring health, happiness and the strength to make it through the tough times ahead.)

Trust Me!

SCENE I: The Oval Office. GEORGE W. BUSH is sitting behind his desk, staring at the ceiling, bored. There are two chairs on either side of his desk; one is a wing chair, and one is a chair that swivels. The back of that chair is facing the audience; light snoring issues forth from it, but we cannot see who occupies it.

BUSH is waiting for HENRY PAULSON, his Secretary of the Treasury, to come in and tell him what to do about the credit crisis. He amuses himself by spinning in circles in his leather executive chair.

A knock is heard at the door.

BUSH: Come in, Paulie! (continues spinning around in his chair)

PAULSON (entering with a smile): Mr. President!

BUSH (stopping the spinning to look at PAULSON): Geez, Paulie, am I glad to see you! (Tries to get up from the chair to shake PAULSON’s hand, staggers and puts his hand on the desk to recover)

PAULSON (indulgently): Now, George, I’ve warned you about spinning in that chair – it always makes you dizzy!

BUSH (petulantly): Then they shouldn’t make it so much fun! (refocusing, gesturing for PAULSON to sit down) Anyway, Paulie, what’s goin’ on in this here economy?

PAULSON (sitting in the wing chair beside BUSH’s desk): Mr. President, we’re in a heckuva mess, I tell you. The credit market is completely frozen. No one will lend businesses money so that they can continue, well, doing business. It’s all because of that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae stuff. They went a little crazy with those subprime mortgages.

That’s the number of occasions upon which the Fascists in the Senate have used the filibuster.

Fifty.

Seven.

Times.

The Fascists have decided upon a wonderful strategery. They know they were the worst Congress evah. They know they did nothing for six years. By all rights, 2008 should see great Democratic gains in both the House and the Senate and make 2006 look like a 50-50 election.

But not so fast! They also know that the traditional media can be counted on to make them look better, no matter what they do. So their game plan is: Filibuster EVERYTHING. Filibustering makes it impossible for the Democrats to do anything, since it is now clear that not enough Fascists are going to vote with them to get cloture (60 votes).

Once they have paralyzed the Congress, they can then point at the Democrats and say, “See? They suck just as badly as we did! There’s no difference between the parties! Stay awaaaaaaaay from the polls! Booga booga booga terra support the troops!”

Up until very recently, the Democrats have not been complaining about Fascist obstructionism, which I believe was a poor choice from a political point of view. Most likely, they felt that it would make them look weak to say that they were being blocked by the opposition party. But today, I heard Senator Bernie Sanders say the words “obstructionism” and “oligarchy” with reference to the Republics. Bravo, Senator!

More like this, please. Americans need to know the source of the gridlock in Washington, and the press isn’t telling us. Speak out, Congressional Democrats, and don’t be shy. We need to hear your voices.

I’ve been listening to Thom Hartmann today, as I do almost every day, and in a rare moment, he said something that upset me.

As a truly fair and balanced guy, Thom always has at least one Fascist on his program. (Recently, he even had the grand-daddy of all neo-cons, Norman Podhoretz, on the show.) After the lunatic du jour had finished foaming at the mouth about SCHIP and how we would be murdering children if it were not vetoed by the Texecutioner, a caller started criticizing the Fascist, and Thom said, “He’s a decent guy. I don’t want to attack him personally; I just disagree with his policies.”

I know that we liberals/progressives are forgiving and tolerant, but there’s a serious flaw in this idea, and I think it is one that should be addressed. Unless you are saying that conservative pundits don’t believe their own policies and are just spouting right-wing nonsense to get paid (which is bad enough), you are somehow divorcing a person’s policies from his/her personality. How in the world does that work?

My personality is optimistic about the nature of humanity. I believe that as a group, we are basically good people, but that we can be misled by propaganda, fear and malignant leaders into supporting policies that are not good for us. Thus, I am a liberal/progressive, and any ideas I have regarding government will come out of those beliefs. In contrast, according to John Dean’s excellent book “Conservatives without Conscience,” conservatives believe that people are inherently evil, and thus advocate for Big Brother to hold our “bad” impulses (homosexuality being one, terminating a pregnancy another) in check through governmental regulations.

The Fascists understand that attack politics works, and that character does matter, precisely because of this fundamental truth: that a decent person does not advocate against giving health insurance to children, or support bombing Iran for no reason, or say that torture is just dandy, or support the removal of habeas corpus and other Constitutional rights in the name of “security.”

Fascist pundits are not decent people. Fascist politicians are not decent people. And if our Democratic leadership would have another “At long last, have you no decency, sir?” moment, it could go a long way towards waking Americans from our long Orwellian nightmare.

Note to other Senators who are running for Preznit: THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE. Use your power any way you can to stand up to the President and his lunatic, paranoid, fascist agenda. Come on, guys, the Deciderer is talking (and giggling) about starting World War III! What’s it gonna take?!

I hope that Dodd’s spinicular fortitude will inspire our Congresscritters. Or perhaps the avalanche of thank-you letters he gets will make them jealous.

Either way, he is setting a great example, and he deserves our heartfelt thanks.

UPDATE: Looks like Senator Obama discovered the hold before Senator Dodd…this time on the nomination of the election-stealer that Bush wanted to be in charge of the Federal Election Commission. Exxxxxxxxxcellent!

Many, many years too late, some brave few in the traditional media have finally begun making the Fascist/Nazi/Bushie connection many of us have been screaming about since the Supreme Court stole the presidency from Al Gore.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

According to Senator Bernie Sanders, progressive and Independent from Vermont, the reason that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi don’t force the Fascists to filibuster on the war is that all other business would cease while it continued. While I understand that line of thinking, I agree with Mr. Rich. There IS no other business until this war ends and our Constitution is restored. We are slowly becoming a fascist state, and going shopping won’t fix it.

There are massive anti-war demonstrations on October 27th. NTodd has many ideas at Pax Americana. Whatever your way of protesting, I hope you are doing it loudly, strongly and often.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the insidious replacement of facts with faith in all areas of life, but most harmfully, in politics.

How many times has President Bush said he prays for this or that group of people? Yet our compliant press never questions him further after he invokes his “faith.” Journamalists and pundits even ask politicians if they pray for the troops. What difference could that possibly make? Are the troops less dead because Nancy Pelosi or anyone else prays for them? Are their wounds less grevious, are their hearts less broken, are their families less destroyed? And what about the millions of dead, wounded and displaced Iraqis? Have prayers helped them?

But no one seems to ask those questions – they’re taboo in our current faith-based society. Apparently, professing faith is a magic wand that waves all responsibility away and stops all brains from processing. It’s amazing how none of the traditional media point out that some of the world’s most nefarious politicians claimed to have faith. Hitler comes to mind – not only was he possessed of a terrifying faith in the German myth of the Superman, but he was also insistent on establishing Christianity as the One True Religion.

I am so proud of the founders of our country for putting a firm separation between church and State into the Constitution. But thanks to the far-right Fascist movement that has taken over our discourse, we now need a separation of faith and state.

We have gone so far backwards in our thinking that we have “faith-based initiatives” instead of programs that actually help people with real problems. Prayer can never replace governmental action and responsibility: rebuilding levees and cities destroyed by natural disasters; caring for our sick, our weak and our poor; creating jobs; rebuilding infrastructure; planning for the future of our planet; and on and on.

These feelings are one reason why I am so gung-ho on Al Gore, who wrote a book dealing with this subject. I would like a President who believes in science and facts, not prayer, as solutions to real-world problems.